Where do contract / temp attorneys come from? Forum

[Bronte]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

[A'nold]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

Lefty treating you well these days?

[Verity]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

I actually set coffee and sex goals for myself. I have it on a calendar and everything. My penalty scheme is also pretty thorough. Light nibbling gets me an extra espresso every week. But no end-zone, no latte.

[Bronte]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

Lefty treating you well these days?

I use the right, but my girl doesn't post about me getting on LR on FB.

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

I actually set coffee and sex goals for myself. I have it on a calendar and everything. My penalty scheme is also pretty thorough. Light nibbling gets me an extra espresso every week. But no end-zone, no latte.

I keep it simple. Black, no sugar. Bareback, no rubber.

[Verity]

Awesome thread.

[A'nold]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

Lefty treating you well these days?

I use the right, but my girl doesn't post about me getting on LR on FB.

Well then jokes on you my friend......I never made LR!

[robotclubmember]

Too much coffee, not enough sex.

Too much coffee, also too much alcohol. The sex front is actually panning out quite nicely though, thank you very much.

Congratulations, I am sure a most raucous act of coitus took place in which all parties were verily satiated. This was an excellent story.

The "adequete supervision" nonsense is a red herring and pure window dressing. A job like e-discovery requires one to look independently at 100s of thousands of individual documents and apply legal training/judgement calls as to whether they're responsive, priviledged, etc. Short of having an American check over every single one, there is no way you can really "supervise" this type of work. But hey, it increases Biglaw profits and screws an entire sub-class of worthless TTT grads like me out of one of the only jobs we could actually earn a living at, so who cares?

At my big four firm we "leverage" India to do lots of routine tasks. Usually these tasks are the kind that are small in impact and high in quantity. Usually the only people that check their work are young staffers who are afraid that India's piss poor work will reflect poorly on them. See, India will start off by doing the basic audit testing and setting up the workpapers, making sample selections, doing substantive testing sometimes, and then we add in the conclusions and analysis. I don't think I ever got a workpaper that started in India that wasn't an absolute turd that needed complete rework. But since each thing they did was low in impact individually, the manager would hide behind the ole "it's immaterial" line (a favorite of the lazy manager) and say that we already put hours into it India and it's not worth going over our budget. Basically, we know its wrong, but the client doesn't know that, because we need to compete with 3 other big 4 firms that include India hours in their budget, and companies will always pick the auditor with the most India hours nowadays. So we have to sell up our India team as being competent and high in quality so that we can justify leveraging them to win the client.

I imagine it's the same in law. Clients want the lawyer whose budget uses the most cheap slave-wage Indian hours. Like you said, there are hundreds of thousands of docs to review, who is ever going to look back to check them to make sure they were reviewed correctly? They probably weren't. That's a part of the outsourcing gimmick though. There is no way the Indian auditors we use could do their jobs correctly, they don't have the knowledge or training we do. Our job does require specific training that they can't just learn from a text book and duplicate, but because its low in "value-add" it doesn't take much to convince the client otherwise. Outsourcing to India will never be a good solution in quality and they know that, but the client doesn't and the client just wants cheap hours so they will always eat it up.

[seatown12]

At my big four firm we "leverage" India to do lots of routine tasks. Usually these tasks are the kind that are small in impact and high in quantity. Usually the only people that check their work are young staffers who are afraid that India's piss poor work will reflect poorly on them. See, India will start off by doing the basic audit testing and setting up the workpapers, making sample selections, doing substantive testing sometimes, and then we add in the conclusions and analysis. I don't think I ever got a workpaper that started in India that wasn't an absolute turd that needed complete rework. But since each thing they did was low in impact individually, the manager would hide behind the ole "it's immaterial" line (a favorite of the lazy manager) and say that we already put hours into it India and it's not worth going over our budget. Basically, we know its wrong, but the client doesn't know that, because we need to compete with 3 other big 4 firms that include India hours in their budget, and companies will always pick the auditor with the most India hours nowadays. So we have to sell up our India team as being competent and high in quality so that we can justify leveraging them to win the client.

I imagine it's the same in law. Clients want the lawyer whose budget uses the most cheap slave-wage Indian hours. Like you said, there are hundreds of thousands of docs to review, who is ever going to look back to check them to make sure they were reviewed correctly? They probably weren't. That's a part of the outsourcing gimmick though. There is no way the Indian auditors we use could do their jobs correctly, they don't have the knowledge or training we do. Our job does require specific training that they can't just learn from a text book and duplicate, but because its low in "value-add" it doesn't take much to convince the client otherwise. Outsourcing to India will never be a good solution in quality and they know that, but the client doesn't and the client just wants cheap hours so they will always eat it up.

cool story

[robotclubmember]

ty

[areyouinsane]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

--LinkRemoved--

Pretty sweet gig: $19 an hour and 10% of health bennies paid.

Yet people are actually (apparently) going to attend R-N or uber-cesspool Seton Hall and the other TTTToilets!

ROTFL!

[A'nold]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

--LinkRemoved--

Pretty sweet gig: $19 an hour and 10% of health bennies paid.

Yet people are actually (apparently) going to attend R-N or uber-cesspool Seton Hall and the other TTTToilets!

ROTFL!

And the evolution of the JDU poster continues.

[nealric]

More stories please. Everyone already knows craigslist jobs in NYC are terrible.

[sunynp]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

--LinkRemoved--

Pretty sweet gig: $19 an hour and 10% of health bennies paid.

Yet people are actually (apparently) going to attend R-N or uber-cesspool Seton Hall and the other TTTToilets!

ROTFL!

And the evolution of the JDU poster continues.

Sorry, what does that mean? You accused me of being a JDU poster simply because I referenced a lot of facts about Seton Hall, where Seton Hall' OCS was interviewed in the article about volunteer attorneys in the USAO - a practice I find unacceptable at many levels. People were talking about how much information is out there - so I posted some stuff about Seton Hall that left me undecided how much people can be expected to know that school's fudge data. And, yeah, I was offended that a respected poster like you would accuse my of something I didn't do. Then you ignored my explanation. But no worries, I got over it.

I don't agree with areyouinsane's manner sometimes, though his stories are funny. But he was one of the only people here who has first-hand experience with contract/temp work. What he posts is directly on point for what was asked in the OP. I don't know if posting Craigslist ads is important, but, whatever. It is the truth of one aspect of practicing law and I don't think that it is wise to shut our eyes to reality.

[areyouinsane]

I poasted this in the Rutgers-Newark thread earlier to tell these kids about "midlaw" firm McCarter & English in Newark NJ. Those kids didn't care for it but maybe you guys will like it:

We used to scroll thru the McCarter associate bios while I was temping there, and most of these mouth breathers are from laughable garbage schools like Seton Hall/NYLS, and got hired because their Daddies work there or their Daddies are federal judges, CEOs, or other "grease" and nepotism. Or they're bottom of the classers from "real" law schools like NYU who got dinged by the NYC biglaw firms and had to ride the PATH out to NJ with their tail between their legs and take a gig at this ghetto-assed dump.

Their offices are also very outdated and borderline embarrassing for a "big" firm. They don't even have their own cafeteria. It's a 1970s era building and the associates share offices. There's one really fat partner who I used to ride the elevator with a lot- he always had a huge hoagie from Subway and mowed it right in the elevator, like something out of a comedy movie or whatever. The lawyers there also dress poorly and are mostly total slobs.

Here's a funny story: I was temping on the big Seroquel case there back in 2008. McCarter was apparently in major trouble before that case came in and the firm was in danger of splitting up. So they poached a partner from a "real" firm and she had a relative at Astra-Zeneca who gave McCarter the doc review portion of the litigation (all the "real" work like motions, objections, etc was done in NYC by I think White & Case- you couldn't trust the mouth-breathers at McCarter with anything important LOL). This broad apparently got a big cut of the action from bringing in that case- she was made instant partner and got a limo to work, etc. I saw her once and she was kinda hot in a cougar sort of way.

So McCarter (after landing the doc review) rented off-site space at the US Customs Building across from SH Law and fired up the project. 90% of the coders were SH or Rutgers grads- it was like a "New Joisey" class reunion! I got called on a Sunday and was hired over the phone - they said "just show up there 8 am Monday." Back then all you needed was bar admission and a pulse to get these gigs (pulse optional).

So anyway, after a couple months we got to a portion of the doc review where the European docs showed up: stuff was in Swedish, Danish, German, etc. So McCarter hired outside non-lawyer translators to read us the docs so we could decide if they were responsive or not. These translators were some real characters: there was a semi-blind old Japanese woman we called "Yoko Ono" and this incredibly good looking Danish underwear model named Lucas. I was assigned to work with Lucas and all the chicks were ga-ga jealous and asking me "what's he like" and "I'd bone him right here on this desk" and stuff like that.

Lucas, however, "played for the other team." He was always talking about his "partner" and their pad in Chelsea and stuff like that. He also told me that in Denmark an employer would be imprisoned for the kind of shit working conditions McCarter gave us. We literally worked in a converted janitor's closet- there was a "slop sink" in the corner and shelves full of trash bags, floor cleaner, etc. They made a desk for us by putting a 4X8 sheet of plywood on top of 2 sawhorses. We sat in metal folding chairs. You see, we had to be "sequestered" somewhere somewhat private since they had to read this shit to us out loud so we could code it.

I learned quite a bit of Danish from Lucas too. If I was gay I'd def. want a partner like him. He told me he turned gay b/c he got tired of sleeping with hot chicks after awhile because it came so easy for him. Seriously, this guy could walk into a bar and chicks would ditch Derek Jeter to hang w/ this dood. Kind of like when the Fonz walked into Arnold's.

So anyway, the translators were treated like VIPs compared to us shitlaw temps, since they spoke rare and "exotic" languages and were not very easily replaced. They also got paid a LOT more than us: they were getting 55-75 an hour, and none of them were even lawyers or JDs, just translators. They got car rides home (and the blind lady Yoko Ono even got led into the room by an associate each day b/c she could only see "sideways," apparently). My buddy Holbs had to work with her and she was always having him tilt the screen and rub her neck & stuff like that. She was from Kyoto originally and spoke like 10 other languages besides Japanese. She hardly got any work done because as I said she was pretty much blind, and also she wrote everyone's names in Japanese with those fancy paintbrush-type pens and made little cards & oragami for people to take home. She was a very nice woman.

McCarter even brought them in these awesome box lunches each day from a gourmet caterer in Jersey City. These swanky lunchboxes had proscuttio and mozz. sandwiches, bottles of Perrier water, a fresh apple & orange, and those elite potato chips that are all purple and shit.

It was funny watching them all go to the conference room and pick up their grub everyday while we worked right alongside them and got jack shit- we usually ate at the crummy overpriced McDonald's inside Newark Penn Station. Lucas was always like "if you guys are really lawyers, why don't you get a box lunch like us?" I told him that we were just temps and went to shitty schools so they had no need to treat us like anything other than garbage. He found America very interesting and said he was gonna tell everyone in Denmark about how weird life here is. He took pictures of the janitor closet we worked in with his Iphone and sent them to friends back home, and none of them belived he was really working in such squalor. Sometimes if he wasn't too hungry he'd share his box lunch with me, or at least give me the apple or the chips, etc.

[rcweedman]

Sometimes if he wasn't too hungry he'd share his box lunch with me, or at least give me the apple or the chips, etc.

LMFAO

[d34d9823]

He told me he turned gay b/c he got tired of sleeping with hot chicks after awhile because it came so easy for him.

Wut.

[Bronte]

Back to form areyouinsane. Stick to this stuff. We've had many TTT-trolls, but you might be the first funny story TTT-troll. It's a lot more entertaining and actually a lot more informative. There's no changing the minds of the kids in the admissions forums. They've made their beds.

[sunynp]

areyouinsane: did you go to a tier 1 NYC school? I didn't look in the thread to see if you identified the name and I don't blame you if you don't. Does your law school count as a TTT?

Also, from your stories and some of the articles, I am appalled that attorneys treat people from the same profession with such a complete lack of respect. I think that goes along with the extreme prestige whoring of the legal profession. Though it seems that many people are uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the treatment of doc review temps - but not enough to treat them decently.

I wonder if some of the push for outsourcing came because firms were getting criticized for treating temp attorneys badly and had no interest in creating better conditions. So by moving the coding offshore, they can treat the attorneys in India as shabbily and pay them even less.

[areyouinsane]

There's no changing the minds of the kids in the admissions forums. They've made their beds.

Yep. Hard to imagine what goes thru these kids minds- show them recent articles about the massive layoffs of lawyers in the NJ government & legal aid, people struggling to work for free as licensed NJ attorneys, etc. Yet they still head off to laughingstock TTToilets like Rutgers, NYLS, Seton Hall, Hofstra, Touro, 'Bozo etc. Betcha 70% or more of them never find a full-time PAYING attorney job.

[d34d9823]

Also, from your stories and some of the articles, I am appalled that attorneys treat people from the same profession with such a complete lack of respect.

Do you really think that Big Law partners consider themselves members of the same profession as doc reviewers?

[Bronte]

Also, from your stories and some of the articles, I am appalled that attorneys treat people from the same profession with such a complete lack of respect.

Do you really think that Big Law partners consider themselves members of the same profession as doc reviewers?

They should. Members of the bar are members of the profession. (And, of course, people deserve decent treatment.) Maybe if more big law partners gave a shit about the profession and about people in general there would be more pressure to shut down some these shithole schools so as to protect the value of a JD and to prevent naive kids from ruining their lives.

[vanwinkle]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

Thanks for advertising that you were trolling one of the Class of 2014 threads. Those threads are for people who have already decided to attend a particular school. Once you're back from your timeout, hopefully you'll keep that in mind.

[d34d9823]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

Thanks for advertising that you were trolling one of the Class of 2014 threads. Those threads are for people who have already decided to attend a particular school. Once you're back from your timeout, hopefully you'll keep that in mind.

I fail to see how telling stories about his actual experiences in the school's market is trolling.

[Paraflam]

I fail to see how telling stories about his actual experiences in the school's market is trolling.

+1

Free areyouinsane

[Emma.]

You guys will LOVE this one- I just posted it (to be helpful) in the Rutgers-Newark thread:

Thanks for advertising that you were trolling one of the Class of 2014 threads. Those threads are for people who have already decided to attend a particular school. Once you're back from your timeout, hopefully you'll keep that in mind.

Dude, really? This seems a little over the top.